What Continue does
Continue is an AI coding assistant delivered as IDE extensions and as a terminal command-line agent (`cn`) with TUI and headless modes. It connects to Model Context Protocol servers, which let it reach external tools, systems and databases from its agent mode.
Why teams reach for it: Continue is an open-source assistant whose model wiring is entirely the developer's: chat, edit, apply, autocomplete, embeddings and reranking are each assigned a model role in a config file, providers range from hosted APIs to a local Ollama model, and the documented offline path - sideload the .vsix, turn off anonymous telemetry, point the default model at a local provider - lets the whole assistant run air-gapped inside VS Code or JetBrains.
How Continue compares
Fields the vendor doesn't document are left blank here rather than guessed — a blank means nothing verified, not a "no."
- Platform
- CLI, IDE extension
- Transports
- stdio, SSE, Streamable HTTP
- Oauth Support
- Yes
- Tools
- Yes
- Config Scope
- user or global, workspace or project
- Open Source
- Yes
Which host will connect to the server?
A client, or agent host, is the application — like Claude or Cursor — that actually connects to and uses an MCP server.